Two people have led me to this item. One was R. Madhavan’s comments on my item titled ‘Forgotten Tamils’ that appeared on September 12. And the other was Prof. A.R. Venkatachalapathy’s latest book, Ashe Adichuvattil , in which he features 13 significant Tamil personages who should be better known. In fact, reading about Venkatachalapthy’s book made me wonder whether this paper’s sister publication in Tamil, which did a fine job at looking at the city during Madras Week, shouldn’t get Venkatachalapathy to do a column similar to mine focussed on ‘Forgotten Tamils’.
Be that as it may, the forgotten Tamil I was reminded of by Madhavan was A. Subbiah Pillai, whom I’d always thought of as the quintessential Western Oriental Gentleman, like his friend, my father, another Subbiah. Both would be impeccably booted and suited, speak to each other in the most perfect, unaccented English, and thoroughly enjoy club life. In fact, Subbiah Pillai was the person who did the spadework for Indians to be admitted to the Kodaikanal (English) Club as Full Members instead of Honorary Members. His interacting with leading British members of the Club from the 1950s led to R.B. Alaganan, W.P.A.R. Nagarajan and himself being admitted in May 1962 as the first full Indian members of the Club. Balu Alaganan became the first Indian President of the Club, but Subbiah, despite being almost a permanent fixture and a livewire in the Club during the Season and even more so after retirement, never became President or Honorary Secretary. Stormy petrel that he was, seeing that the Club maintained the highest standards was his priority.
Subbiah’s Western orientation began in the Imperial Bank where he was a senior manager. In 1945, he moved to Madras as the second General Manager of the Indian Overseas Bank that had been founded in 1935 by another person with a Western orientation, M.Ct.M. Chidambaram Chettyar. Together, they did much for the Indian communities in Burma, the Strait Settlements, the Federated Malay States and Ceylon.
All this was a far cry from the key role Subbiah played in organising the First International Tamil Conference in Malaya in 1966 under the leadership of his friend from another world, the world of Tamil scholarship, Rev. Fr. Xavier S. Thanninayagam, a Ceylon Tamil. Subbiah Pillai was a key figure in organising the subsequent Tamil conferences as well till his death.
He was not only a thoroughly-involved organiser and the treasurer of the International Association of Tamil Research founded in 1964 but also a keen participant in its conferences. At the first international conference held in Malaysia, he presented a paper titled ‘Is phonetic change universal and inevitable? (A study based in the phonological structure of Tamil)’. At the second conference, held in Madras in 1968, he presented ‘Consonant clusters and word initials and finals in Tamil’. He was the convener of this conference.
The proceedings of third and fourth international conferences held in Paris and Jaffna, respectively, have not yet been published, but at the fifth international conference, held in Madurai in 1981, he presented a paper ‘The Tamil Language’. He was the convener of this conference too. In the proceedings of the conference, another paper, ‘A note on Tamil studies — Tamil and the Dravidians’, was published by him.
In his paper on ‘The Tamil Language’, he said, “Tamil is the oldest of the living (i.e. spoken) languages in the world. If recent historical developments prove correct, Tamil may be considered the progenitor of all language families in the world, including the Indo-European. The Dravidians have become the most serious problem to world scholars, as they are unable to name any country as their original homeland. From Finland in the northernmost part of Europe to Australia in the southeastern part of the world, traces of their contact have been discovered.”
He concluded that paper with a call for script reform Tamil needed for better communication through print. This could years later have had a role to play in the world of computer communication. He wrote: “Early Tamil inscriptions were made by Jain and Buddhist monks but we do not have any record of the Tamil Script as such, as writing was then known to the Tamils and was used in the palm leaf manuscripts. We have to discover it from the present style of writing. We may take the present type of vowels and consonants as they are and we find that the Vocalic Consonants are derived therefrom by a curved indicator either above or below or on either side of the consonant.”
A degree for music
Today, several institutions in Tamil Nadu offer undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Classical Indian Music and Dance. But, I doubt whether there is a music degree receiver today or even a majority of teachers who realise that this is the hundredth year of Indian Classical Music being recognised as a subject worthy of being a part of higher education. It was in 1916-17 that Indian Music was offered as an elective in Queen Mary’s College, the second oldest women’s college in the South and which got affiliated to the University of Madras that year. Ten years later, QMC students could take Music as part of their Intermediate course, with the legendary Prof. P Sambamoorthi instructing them.
Was this the first Indian music course taught in an English language oriented college in India? Whether it was or not, the University of Madras was the first University in India to start a Department of Music.
That was in May 1932 when, under the headship of ‘Tiger’ Varadachari, a one-year diploma course was introduced. Research work was also started. Vocal, veena and violin were taught as were the theory and history of music.
In 1937, the diploma course was made a two-year course and students were enrolled for an M. Litt degree in Indian Music, with P. Sambamoorthi heading the Department.
The first M. Litt degree was awarded in 1940. Sambamoorthi retired as Reader and Head of the Department in 1961 and was succeeded by Dr. Miss Isaac. In 1975, Dr. Miss S. Seetha took over as Head and the next year became the Department’s first Professor. She introduced the MA course in 1976 and a BA course in 1982.
Today, one of the most popular departments in the University, the Department of Indian Music also offers degrees in Bharatanatyam and Folk Music.
Just as the University’s department has grown, so has QMC’s, offering as it does undergraduate and postgraduate courses as well as guiding students for doctorates.
Fanciful insistence
Despite regular repetition in this column, that Robert Clive had never lived outside Fort St. George and Fort St. David, Cuddalore, except to wander into the Indian towns on occasion and, in the case of the former, venture into the St. Thomas’ Mount area, I keep hearing people insist Clive lived here, there and everywhere. And the places they would indicate were always places where Robert Clive’s son Edward set foot 50 years later.
I was reminded of such attempts to ‘glorify’ people and places without the least truth in the ‘fact’ insisted on when, the other day, I spoke to a group of American students. In the audience were as many Indians interested in my subject: ‘The Madras-American Connect’. At the end of it, one of the locals came up to me and said, “You didn’t mention that Elihu Yale was married in St Andrew’s Kirk.” I gently replied that he was married in St Mary’s in the Fort. No, you’re wrong, the people at the Kirk told me so, he insisted. I again softly repeated my view only to find my listener even more emphatically insistent. Whereupon, I couldn’t resist saying that it must have been a miracle, a man being led to the altar in November 1680 and getting married in a church consecrated in 1821. Yale’s was the first marriage in St Mary’s in the Fort and I suggested to my doubter to look up the marriage registers that are available and the records of the Kirk that are also available.
But, thinking about all this later, I wondered whether the Kirk’s storytellers were confused by the fact that before St Mary’s there was a St. Andrew’s Church in the Fort, in what was known as Portuguese Square, now the site of the Namakkal Kavingnar Maligai. This was a Catholic church started in 1642 by Father Ephraim de Nevers (Miscellany, January 9, 2006) where, when it was not being used by the Roman Catholics, he allowed other denominations to hold services. St. Andrew’s in the Fort remained opened till 1749, when the English closed it down after re-occupying the Fort following the French occupation. But while Yale might well have worshipped in it before St. Mary’s was consecrated in 1680, the records show that his was the first marriage to take place in what was to be known as the Governor’s Church, St Mary’s, for which Governor Streynsham Master had raised funds from the local Anglicans.
